Efficient method for designing slabs for production from an order book
AssigneeInternational Business Machines Corporation
InventorsMilind Wasudeo Dawande, Jayant R. Kalagnanam, Ho Soo Lee, Mark Elliot Trumbo
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Abstract
An efficient computer implemented method is used to design slabs for production from an order book. This method minimizes the number of slabs designed to fulfill an order book. This method is based on a heuristic algorithm which is a variant of the greedy approach for the set covering method. The variations are novel in three ways. First, designing slabs using the flexibility in the order size; second, using weight for choosing large slabs; and third, controlling the exponential nature of enumeration of the set of all subsets by constructing only the largest slab at each step.
Claims3
A computer implemented method for slab design from orders while satisfying all given restrictions and achieving near-optimization comprising the steps of:
- iteratively applying a set covering algorithm to design slabs from orders while minimizing the number of designed slabs;
- and
- applying a maximum flow algorithm as a post processing step to the set covering algorithm step to minimize the number of partial surplus quantities of designed slabs.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.